It is customary in current day retailing practices, to have checkout counters at the exit of a facility, each equipped with a clerk-controlled POS station effecting checkout of articles through bar code scanning, retrieval of article price from a storage unit containing article price cross-correlated with article bar code, display of the description and price of each article selected for checkout to a customer, and selected article price totalization, and providing the customer with a printout of the customer's transactions in purchasing articles.
A data structure disparity exists as between signals generated by a POS station for use in providing the printout of customer's transactions and signals processable by host computer equipment. For instance, bar code lookup for bottled or canned goods, e.g., baked beans or tomato soup, yields single line data, decodable as so-called "SLD" (single line decoding). The respective single line data would read "BAKED BEANS 0.35" and "TOM SOUP 0.30". This type of data is readily processable by host computer equipment.
However, for other goods, typically unpackaged produce, bar code lookup yields multiple line data, decodable as so-called "MLD". For example, the data furnished at the POS to its printer in this instance may comprise a first line "LOOSE CARROTS" and a second line "1.0 Kg @ 0.25/Kg 0.25". Since the POS and printer software for decoding is, readily managed independently of the host computer equipment, no difficulty attends the data structure disparity as between SLD and MLD at the POS station level.
The data structure disparity, however, takes on significance in transmissions from POS stations to host computer equipment. The latter is manufactured without facility for input tolerance of data having decoding meaning only under MLD constraints and, evidently, the manufacturer's of POS equipment have no interest in or desire to adversely make inroads on their products to accommodate data structure disparities as between their equipment and host computer equipment. Thus, POS equipment is presently operated at or close to its performance limits and any additional processing requirements are perceived by the manufacturers and their client to hinder the essential function of POS equipment.